Ever get the question, "If God is so real, then why does he let bad things happen to good people?" I get that a lot. I'm a teacher at a Christian school, it comes up almost every day, depending on what teenage problem is happening at any particular moment in time. And I know that most people, Christian and non-christian alike have asked this question.
When you understand the character of God and know who God is, this question becomes easier to answer. God loves us, He adores us, He wants nothing but the best for us. Let's face it, would you send your only Son to die for a bunch of people? I wouldn't, I'm too selfish.
What we need to understand is that there is a difference between what God allows and what Man allows. God gave human beings free choice. It's a precious gift, but when sin entered into the world, it became our downfall. Why give us free choice if all we would do with it is bad things? Answer this for me, would you rather have a relationship with someone who cared about you because they chose to? or because they were made to?
God gave us free choice to set us apart from every other living thing in creation, we don't just act on instinct, we choose the path of our lives, and He wants us to choose His path. It means the world to Him when we do. And he made us in His image, nothing else in creation is made that way. This means that if God has free choice, so do we.
This being said, there are certain implicatations and responsibilities to having a choice. People can choose to have a good life or an evil one, they can choose to uplift people around them or drag them down. If someone has caused you hurt, don't blame God it was their choice, and their choice can affect you.
As for things out of our control, or anyone else's for that matter, such as disease. That too was initially a choice. The world was never created to harbour disease, or death for that matter, but the original sin of Adam and Eve, the choice that they made to go directly against what God had said, brought with it certain consequences. Those consequences are what we now have to live with on a daily basis.
Of course if you are a believer, you know that not only did God send Jesus to die for our sins and create the path by which we can come into the presence of God, he also conquered death and disease. As Christians, we believe that God can heal. We believe that through prayer God can do anything. Unfortunately for us, God doesn't just answer our prayers with a, "yes", sometimes it's, "no", or "not now", but that is another post all on it's own. But we can take comfort that sometimes, even if the healing is not physical, it is always spiritual, and that is the true healing that we all need.
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